ISBN-13: 9781780491028 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 256 str.
ISBN-13: 9781780491028 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 256 str.
This volume questions the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of right-wing extremism and the way in which rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas have been adopted by main stream politicians and in main stream public discourse. Politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have tended to resist specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation.
Governments across Europe have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies. Xenophobia and hostility towards -others- is on the rise, along with appeals to -Tradition and Security-. -Cultures of fear- are linked with fantasies of fusion or -imagined sameness-. Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body, echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of -group hypochondria- in connection with the burning of witches and heretics; -The Church, and State united to it, could tolerate no foreign body within itself, and turned ferociously upon any that it found.- To address the current political developments, the volume stresses the urgency of understanding the fantasies and affects which underpin them.